Jefferson Gets His Wish: At Last, a Decent Bottle Of Virginia Wine

By R.W. APPLE Jr.

Published: September 13, 2000

Correction Appended

BARBOURSVILLE, Va.—
LUCA PASCHINA and a few other Virginia farmers are succeeding in one of the few endeavors at which Thomas Jefferson failed: winemaking.

Jefferson, of course, was one of the greatest of all Americans. He drafted much of the noble language of the Declaration of Independence. As president, he doubled the land area of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. He founded the University of Virginia and designed its main buildings, which have held their place ever since among the masterworks of American architecture. His books, bought by the government, formed the basis of the Library of Congress, one of the world's great collections.

He was also the nation's first connoisseur of fine wines. During his five years in Europe, as ambassador to France from 1784 to 1789, he tasted and ordered that continent's best bottles, often at the wineries where they were made. Names familiar today -- Volnay and Meursault, Yquem and Margaux, Hermitage and Johannisberg -- are there in his journals.

Even in Jefferson's old age at Monticello, when his means were limited, his passion for the grape continued. Between January 1822 and February 1824, he and his guests consumed 1,203 bottles of wine.

But Jefferson was a flop as a winemaker. During his time in Paris, he rooted cuttings from the Clos de Vougeot in his garden on the Champs-Elysees, and later he planted vineyards at Monticello. Though he grew grapes for 55 years in the hills of Albemarle County, Va., James M. Gabler writes in ''Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson'' (Bacchus Press, 1995) that there is no evidence Jefferson ever produced a single bottle of wine. He was thwarted by untimely freezes and phylloxera, the root-eating louse.

Nonetheless, he remained convinced that the potential was there. He wrote in 1811 to John Dortie, ''We have every soil, aspect and climate of the best wine countries, and I have myself drunk wines made in this state and in Maryland of the quality of the best Burgundy.'' His friend and collaborator Filippo Mazzei, who was born in Tuscany, agreed. He wrote in 1816, ''I do not believe that nature is so favorable to growing vines in any country as this.''

Now, two centuries after Jefferson's heyday, wines of quality are at last being produced from classic vinifera grapes here at Barboursville, only 20 miles northeast of Monticello, and other vineyards around the state. None is yet the equal of ''the best Burgundy,'' or even close to it, and regrettably few are available outside Virginia and the District of Columbia. Even in the commonwealth, it is hard to find the much-honored Valhalla reds (like a cabernet franc called Gotterdammerung and a shiraz) that Dr. James Vascik, a neurosurgeon, produces 2,000 feet above the Roanoke Valley.

Many of the best vineyards produce less than 5,000 cases a year.

Still, Jefferson would have cheered. The best of the Virginia wines are fresh, graceful, deeply colored and full of varietal character. Those produced at Barboursville Vineyards, where Mr. Paschina, 38, is the general manager and winemaker, are among the most widely praised in the state, and they are available in New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington and elsewhere.

They come from grapes grown in fields surrounding the intensely romantic red-brick ruin of a house designed by Jefferson and built between 1814 and 1822 for his friend James Barbour, a governor of Virginia, senator and ambassador to Britain.

Based on a recent tasting, the 1998 Barboursville Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, which will be released in late October, shows every sign of developing into the best wine of the vineyard's first two decades -- no one-dimensional fruit bomb, but complex and balanced in the European style.

MR. PASCHINA, a tall, lean, sharp-featured man with lively gray eyes, came here as a consultant for the 1990 harvest. The vineyard had been started in 1976 by Gianni Zonin, a Tuscan with holdings in the Chianti region, Friuli, Piedmont, Lombardy and Sicily. He spotted the property on a vacation trip to Charlottesville, ran some analyses of its soil and of the prevailing climate, and promptly decided to buy it. He was attracted to the lay of the land, Mr. Paschina said, and by the fact that some of it had long since been cleared of trees for use as a pasture for cows and hence could be planted immediately with vines.

''Of course, the history of the place, the Jefferson connection, the ruins all interested him, too,'' Mr. Paschina added. ''He's an Italian.''

For the first 15 years, Barboursville produced mediocre wine. That is my view, having tasted some of the early vintages, and it is Mr. Paschina's as well. To him, ''they really didn't amount to very much.'' To me, some exhibited a bouquet redolent of gym socks.

In fact, Mr. Paschina had decided to return to his native region, Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, when his contract was up. Progress, he had concluded, would be very slow. But one night just before leaving, he sat on the deck of his house, watching the sun set as a flock of Canada geese flew above the orderly, well-tended rows of vines. He was enchanted by the scene.

This is idyllic, deeply rural country, with but a few crossroads villages. The enigmatic Blue Ridge lie off to the west, cloaked in the haze that gives them their name. White-fenced horse farms, some owned by actors and actresses who have sought refuge here, give the landscape a patrician flavor.

Maybe Mr. Paschina was fated to be here. Piedmont is a region of rolling hills at the foot of the Alps; this part of Virginia, also known as the Piedmont, is an area of rolling hills at the foot of the Blue Ridge. Maybe that's sloppy sentimentality. At any rate, he went back to Italy, presented his report to Mr. Zonin, and three days later returned to Barboursville as its manager.

''That first year,'' he told me, ''I pruned all winter long with the people here. They had no idea how to do it. I changed the system of trellising, and gradually we built up our knowledge of the conditions here. Gradually better vines became available, and we learned which ones would do best.''

Like everyone who succeeds at his hard trade, Mr. Paschina, a graduate of the oenological school at Alba, near Turin, ruthlessly ripped out older, lower-quality vines, some of which had originally come from upstate New York, in favor of higher-quality material from California, Italy and France. Just recently, he uprooted 18 acres. He decided to change rootstock. And he began rigorously stripping smaller clusters of grapes from the vines, discarding them so that all the plant's energy would be focused on producing prime clusters.

''The old vines made pretty good wines,'' he said as he, my wife, Betsey, and I bumped along the rutted vineyard roads in his car. ''But they were never going to make great wines.''

In between his pruning forays and his other vineyard chores, Mr. Paschina travels widely through the region, promoting his wines. At one tasting at the Boar's Head Inn in Charlottesville in 1991, he met Patricia Yetman, who was working in computer engineering. The next year, they were married in front of the Barboursville ruins, and they now have two children, age 6 and 3.

At the moment, Barboursville Vineyards covers 120 of Mr. Zonin's 870 acres, which are divided between Jefferson's Albemarle County and James Madison's Orange County. A new restaurant, called Palladio, is part of a complex of low, handsome buildings. In 1999, the winery produced 28,000 cases; in 2000, it will make about 32,000. Eventually, Mr. Paschina hopes to plant up to 150 acres, which should yield roughly 50,000 cases.

SO what are his prospects of making the great wine he covets?

''Virginia producers have climate problems that may keep them from reaching the heights,'' said Jean-Pierre Rovani, who studies East Coast wines for Robert M. Parker Jr., the wine critic. ''There's too much humidity, which can cause mildew, and hurricanes and storms roar up the coast some years at the critical point of the growing cycle. Heavy rain when you least want it.''

That said, Mr. Rovani suggested that Barboursville Vineyards, of all the Virginia producers, ''may have the most promise of excellence.''

William C. Curtis, who is the proprietor of Tastings, a Charlottesville wine shop, and is a leading authority on Virginia wines, attributes the improvement at Barboursville to Mr. Zonin's money as well as Mr. Paschina's ''drive, energy, youth and enthusiasm.'' Although he thinks that growing conditions may in the long run prove to be better in the Shenandoah Valley, where temperatures run 9 or 10 degrees cooler than here, he now puts Barboursville's in his ''upper pantheon'' of wines, along with those of tiny vineyards like White Hall, west of here; Breaux and Linden, in northern Virginia; Rockbridge, in the Shenandoah Valley; and Valhalla, near Roanoke.

Other vineyards that have won high ratings in one competition or another are Oak encroft, near Charlottesville, run by the doyenne of the Virginia wine trade, Felicia Warburg Rogan; Horton, a viognier specialist that also produces a historically interesting but, to my taste, rather off-putting Norton; and Jefferson, whose grapes grow on the site of Mazzei's experiments.

Wine of dubious potability was made at Jamestown as early as 1609; David Lett, the Oregon pinot noir pioneer, tells me that his forebears planted Corinth grapes there. Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the last century, Virginia claret, based on the native grape propagated by and named for a prominent Richmond physician named Norton, achieved a measure of renown, but by 1930 those vines had all but vanished.

The best Virginia wines are the reds, in my view, although whites made most of the running in the 1980's and early 1990's, and some chardonnays are still very well regarded. The biggest shortcoming in the group as a whole is a certain lack of the acidic backbone essential to outstanding wine.

''Getting good, deep, mature tannins in our reds is difficult,'' said Jane Rouse of Rockbridge, ''and we aren't going to succeed every year.''

Like many of its competitors, Barboursville produces a whole range of wines, including dry whites (chardonnay, viognier and pinot grigio), sweet whites (malvasia and phileo, a blend of muscat canelli and four other grapes) and dry reds (including cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, sangiovese, barbera and nebbiolo). Mr. Paschina and other Virginia growers argue that local conditions are especially well suited for cabernet franc, which is a secondary grape in the wines of the Medoc but the dominant grape in great St.-Emilions like Cheval Blanc and Figeac and in Loire Valley reds like Chinon.

The influx of professionals like Mr. Paschina in the 1990's, either as consultants or as resident winemakers, has vastly improved quality.

By now, there are more than 60 Virginia wineries, a startling increase from the six lonely pioneers of 1979, and the state government runs an active wine marketing program. A decade behind Oregon, perhaps, still subject to wide variations from one vintage to the next, the Virginia wine industry may be the most significant ''emerging nation'' of American viticulture.

Reds, Whites And Blue Ridge

A WIDE selection of Virginia wines is available at Tastings, William C. Curtis's shop at 502 East Market Street in Charlottesville, Va., (804) 293-3663. Next to the shop is a small restaurant (dinner only) with 250 wines by the glass, usually including several from Virginia; any wine in the shop's stock may be ordered at retail price plus a $5 corkage fee.

A fair number of Virginia wines appear on the wine lists of two of the state's outstanding restaurants: the Inn at Little Washington, at Main and Middle Streets in Washington, Va., (540) 675-3800, an hour and a half west of Washington, D.C., in the shadow of the Blue Ridge, and Metropolitain, at 214 West Water Street in Charlottesville, about two hours southwest of the capital, (804) 977-1043.

Correction: September 20, 2000, Wednesday A picture caption in this section last Wednesday with an article about winemaking in Virginia referred incompletely to a house designed by Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of what is now Barboursville Vineyards. The picture showed the house when it was still standing; as the article noted, it is now a picturesque ruin.